Rebooting makes hard drive run faster?

[CollinsKofahl]

My mechanical hard drive is slow, but rebooting makes it run noticeably faster for a few hours and/or sleep-wake cycles. Why is this?

This happens on both Windows 7 and 8.1, but I suspect is OS-independent.

 

[Astralv]

If it is Green drive, like WD Green, it falls asleep when not in use and it takes a while to wake it up when you need to access the file on that drive. But when you restart computer, it is likely awake. Check your power saving settings if it is not Green drive.

 

[CollinsKofahl]

If it is Green drive, like WD Green, it falls asleep when not in use and it takes a while to wake it up when you need to access the file on that drive. But when you restart computer, it is likely awake. Check your power saving settings if it is not Green drive.

The drive is set to never sleep.

 

[Solandri]

Check your memory usage in Task Manager (ctrl-alt-del, select Task Manager). My first guess is some program you've installed on both copies of Windows has a memory leak. When you reboot, it takes up very little memory so everything is fine. As the hours tick by, it consumes more memory, forcing Windows to start moving memory pages to the pagefile on the disk. Pagefile accesses then slow down other drive access.

Or if you're like most people and keep a browser running with a bunch of tabs open all the time, those can end up using a large amount of RAM. Which again can result in Windows having to use the pagefile.

 

[RolandJS]

That's kind of what I experience much of the time; a reboot clears everything out of the memory, closes all open EXEs, DLLs, etc., closes saved and unsaved open documents and projects. A new post / boot / Windows startup begins a new session, a "clean work-desk".

 

[jsmithepa]

U may have a memory leak. Or defrag is running unnecessarily.

Monitor cpu load, HD activity, physical men available, swap memory in use.